All games can usually run on some machines with slightly lower requirements then they say. They put the requirements at what runs good, not what runs good most of the time but will lock up every hr or so.

Above, they say that developing tech to take advantage of multi-core CPUs is technologically imposible and/or not feasible. Apparently they have never heard of NIVIDIA's THREADED OPTIMIZATION TECHNOLOGY.

Threaded optimization makes your GPU benefit from multi-core CPU's. Since NIVIDIA did develop such a tech, I really can't see why Blizzard with their multi-billion $$$ income cannot make use of it.

This technology is available to my Nividia Gigabyte GTX 580, alongwith PHYSX technology which Blizzard -again- make no use of. I am so tired of Blizzard's lies, really I am.

You seriously have a problem with taking someone's words out of context, or twisting them around, to suit your argument. You should work for Fox News.

Blizzard: "Optimization for 2+ CPUs would be great, but I don’t know how feasible it is, I suspect it would take major resources to do any kind of major improvement on this, resources that might be better spent somewhere else since the game runs just fine on current CPUs."

Your interpretation: Blizzard says its technologically impossible or not feasible!!

Where did he say its impossible? Where did he say its not feasible? He said he doesn't know *how feasible* it is. He didn't say it's not feasible.

In context, he said that he doesn't know what it'd take to change WoW to optimize it to 2+ CPUs, but he's assuming it'd take more resources than it'd actually be worth, considering that WoW runs just fine on current CPUs, which you yourself admit.

The problem is that WoW isn't even using 50% of my November 2007 CPU and 2010 GPU at ULTRA settings. The problem is that I can play WoW at ULTRA settings with my CPU and GPU 50% underclocked. The problem is that WoW does not look awesome on Ultra settings. In fact, it looks pretty much the same on my 2002 computer at LOWEST as it does at my desktop PC at ULTRA.

Bottomline, the problem is that Blizzard is too lazy to bring the game to 2012. The game is still at 2005/2006, with the sole exception of water textures upgrade.

So quit WoW if the graphics means that much to you.

edit: I get the feeling this is your first Blizzard game. Blizzard's games have *never* been about being at the forefront of graphics technology, or pushing your hardware to the max. In that regard, Blizzard have always made games with simpler graphics in order to appeal to a broader market. For example, when StarCraft was released, people compared it to a game called Total Annihilation, which featured pre-rendered units and animations. StarCraft still had pixels, so people said that TA was graphically superior. But guess which game was vastly more popular?

The amount of care that is put into design is quite impressiveThat's a lie, as WoW looks almost identical on a 2002 PC at LOWEST and a 2011 PC at ULTRA. Clearly, they haven't put impressive amounts of design into the game.

but after questing or raiding on a certain area, they will probably notice in the end that there was something special on that scenery that they just couldn’t quite put their finger on what it was.Lie, the last time any gamer was awed by graphics in WoW was in 2005.

The design ends up being extremely appealingLie, the last zones that were extremely appealing in WoW were Feralas, Barrens, Un'Goro Crater, Wetlands and Tanaris from WoW Vanilla. That was EIGHT (8) years ago.

I’ve played other games with the latest generation graphics engines and I must say that while some like to take advantage of showing off the engine capabilities, and try to impress players with technicalities, like using extremely high resolution textures and latest vertex shaders, most of them fail in delivering superb designYet another lie this guy is saying that Battlefield 3, Crysis 2, and Call Of Duty 2 (even SWTOR) graphics suck compared to WoW's ancient graphics from 2004.

SWTOR was a bad game compared to WoW, but graphics-wise, it just beats WoW's face to the mud. It goes without saying that no
2002 PC can run SWTOR or any other modern game. My next move will be to try to run MoP on my Pentium 266 MHz laptop from 1999.
I get the feeling that it will run.

If you judge SWtor to be better graphics-wise then WoW, you need an optician and a new screen! It's like comparing Doom to WoW and saying doom looks better...

Character models could use a lift for sure, but everything else in the game is currently very high up the ladder when it comes to graphics.

It will bite Blizzard in the ass eventually. The gamer market is -very- sensitive for graphics and amazing shiny new things. The moment an mmo comes along with the same end gameplay as WoW but with better more modern graphics a lot of people will stop playing WoW ... Blizzard is pretty much forced to update their engine with almost every expansion or they'll risk other online games to come give them an uppercut and steal their playerbase away.

Guild Wars 2 would've been the most played Western mmo now if it hadn't been for the fact that their endgame design was ..... non-existant.

I wouldn't count 25 fps while in the middle of nowhere questing on the absolute lowest possible settings adequately running the game. Do a sha of anger group, or even a 25 man raid on your old PC.

The minimum system requirements are the minimum requirements to adequately be able to do everything in the game. With less than that you might be able to work the AH UI or wander around questing but you sure as hell aren't raiding. They don't want someone with a PC like your very old one to buy the game thinking they'll be able to easily enjoy all the features of the game. Because they can't. That's why it's under the minimum requirements.

On a more serious note, these retarded kids that think games are all graphics need to be shot in the head.

You are the reason why pathetic games like CoD release a new game every year. Same sh*t, terrible story, 2 hour games that you play through in one day, and then spend some weeks playing multiplayer, because you only care about graphics.

Funny how you always come back to WoW though, and its "terrible graphics".

On a scale of importance, graphics are probably one of the least important aspects in a game.

Learn that you vermin.

Um, CoD is ridiculously ugly. If anything it's the same thing as wow, a graphically dated game by developers who show a huge reluctance to improve their game visually

One of the main appeals of WOW is you can run it on the widest variety of computer set ups. You do not need the latest rig to play it. My computer that was 6 years old (before i got a new one) ran WOW fine.

You could probably run WOW on most smart phones.

My name is Cernunnos, I will love you like no other, I have died a thousand deaths, each time I died I thought of you.

WoW's ENGINE is very dated and runs much worse than an engine made from scratch that takes advantage of the 'trends' in computer gaming of the last few years (multi-core [3+] CPUs, SSDs, very fast/cheap RAM, etc.) They're not going to rewrite it from scratch though it wouldn't be that much of a financial burden if they did it over the course of MoP and had it ready for whatever the next expansion is. They won't, of course, because it's not necessary (from a profit standpoint) and a lot of people who run WoW don't have most (or any) of these features.

Mind you, it's kind of silly to say (in Blizzard's case) that the game runs 'just fine' on current hardware. It really doesn't. Does it run ok? Sure. But (as mentioned earlier) not taking advantage of certain hardware advances does limit what can be done with the engine. Artistically, well, that's up to whomever is playing the game at the time. They've come a long way since the Vanilla days in terms of structure and NPC design, though not everything is (in my opinion) designed well.

Note - I'm using a Core 2 Duo at 2.6 Ghz with 4 GBs of DDR2 RAM and a 6870. Thanks to some contributions I'll be upgrading to a FX-4100 at 3.6 Ghz (not great, but.. meh) with 8 GBs of DDR3 RAM and the same card. I keep seeing people saying they're running the game at Ultra settings with similar (or worse!) hardware then my current rig with 'only occasional issues'. I must be doing something wrong cause unless I'm basically running around an empty-ish city, there is no way I'm hitting a rock steady 60 FPS in Ultra. Don't even get me started on the FPS I get in raids. I'm not a graphics whore, by any real stretch, but I still get slowdown and subpar (below 30 FPS) performance in 10 man raiding (at basically the lowest settings) which I am HOPING is (was?) my CPU.

I think wow's graphics have their own style and i love it. It suits the game extremely well and despite the engine being rather...."old" if you compare the game's graphics today to those when it was released....it won't even look like the same game.

They don't understand that I would rather have that high resolution texture over it with stuff like tessellation and displacement mapping as a fast but impressive way to create surface relief and give it some finer 3d details over the pixelated screenshots that they call WoW graphics.

They don't understand that I would rather have that high resolution texture over it with stuff like tessellation and displacement mapping as a fast but impressive way to create surface relief and give it some finer 3d details over the pixelated screenshots that they call WoW graphics.

You know, you could get the same result if you reroute the plasma conduits throgh the deflector and then reverse the polarity.

That being said, I have no idea what you are talking about, please cease your technobabble unless you desperately WANT to accumulate nerdpoints.